In principle, the criteria of what is and isn’t “essential” is determined by unelected agency and department heads using guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget based on a Department of Justice opinion authored in 1980 by then–Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. That determination,according toMcClatchy, defines “essential” activities as those that “protect life and property”—a fundamentally reactionary (and curiously unexamined) criterion that elevates property over justice, feeding people, and protecting the vulnerable.

When Congress passed laws over the past decades to feed the poor, educate people, and create public spaces, it didn’t mark these efforts as “nonessential.” This distinction is simply an extra-legal assertion by the government that’s been mindlessly accepted by the media and internalized by the broader public. But what is and isn’t “essential” isn’t a determination made by some objective bureaucrat simply calling balls and strikes; it’s the entire framework for how this right-wing administration and Congress will remake government in its image—all without input from the public.

There’s the broader ideological coup as well. As Michael ZuckermannotedinThe Atlanticin 2013, by calling it a “government shutdown” the left runs the risks that many Americans will not notice their lives change in a clear way as the months roll on. The ROI, or “return on investment,” of liberal government–education, science, children’s health–are not noticeable in an immediate and demonstrable way. Each day the “government shutdown” rolls on is another day the far right achieves another propaganda victory by giving the public the impression that government must not be very important if its wholesale closure has no impact on people’s lives.

Conservatives will use any shield they can to keep the truth of their intentions hidden, except when they don’t need to anymore. The GOP is now nakedly grabbing more for the rich and willfully harming those less well off. The Republican party is the party of Me, Me, Me.

They act as though taxes and government are designed to deny them their due. Thankfully most people can see through this. Democracy was designed to shield against the rich exploiting the poor. Not the other way around.

In “Inequality and Democratization,” the political scientists Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels show that this demand for political inclusion generally isn’t driven by a desire to use the existing institutions to plunder the elites. It’s driven by a desire to keep the elites from continuing to plunder them.

It’s easy to say that everyone ought to have certain rights. Democracy is how we come to get and protect them. Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the “organized banditry” of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights.

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesn’t strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

Ultimately, it’s the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

Labor unions are the common man’s friend. There is just no excuse for shutting a viable business to spite your employees.

This week, we learned just how horrifying some rich people find the idea of employees coming together to improve their workplace.

Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America.

Labor unions have done more for the average American than all the rich industrialists put together. Unions are a legal right and the single most powerful tool that regular working people have to improve their lot. DNAinfo and Gothamist employees, who did the fundamentally important work of telling us all what is happening in our cities, were punished for exercising their rights.

Digital media workers have unionized because they understand how they are being exploited at work, and how to fix it.

This article gets back the heart of what NobodyisFlyingthePlane means.

You can’t make sense of [Trump’s] shocking victory last year without reference to the downward spiral of public faith in governing elites and established institutions. Years of stagnating incomes, combined with dimming prospects for the future, have primed voters for the message that the system is “rigged” and that only an outsider not beholden to the corrupt establishment can clean it up.

That’s an essential part of NobodyisFlyingthePlane.

Any smart and decent person knew that Trump could never be the solution to lost faith in government. Sadly his message resonated with enough ignorant racist sheep and their self interested political overlords to elect him.

The good part of this article recognizes that the President alone won’t be a solution. We had all these same problems when we had the only decent man since Carter as President. The system itself is rigged and it’s those players we have to battle.

Our predicament of slow growth and sky-high inequality has many causes, but one important factor is the capture of the American political system by powerful insiders — big businesses, elite professionals, wealthy homeowners — that use it to entrench their own economic power. In so doing, they protect themselves from competition, fatten their bank accounts with diverted wealth and slow the creative destruction that drives economic growth.

In the financial sector, a web of regulatory subsidies sustains financial institutions’ unhealthy reliance on extremely high levels of debt. These subsidies, including policies that strongly encourage mortgage securitization as well as the implicit promise to bail out “too big to fail” institutions, swell profits in the near term while increasing the systemic risk of a catastrophic meltdown in the long run. The result is a financial sector much bigger than the economy needs, chronic misallocation of capital and the diversion of some of the country’s top talent into counterproductive work. Luring people into excessive debt, draining their savings with hidden fees, inflating the next asset bubble — these and other dubious “contributions” by finance to the economy need to be curtailed.

The problem is not only at the national level. NIFTP is happening at the local and state level.

In addition, many regressive regulations are made in obscure places with limited participation, such as state licensing boards and town councils in charge of approving new housing. Insiders with narrow interests, whether self-serving professional groups or Nimby neighbors, have the motivation and resources to show up at poorly attended meetings and work the system, often at odds with the general public’s interest in low prices and economic opportunity.

One suggested solution:

Courts at all levels need to be less deferential to regulatory schemes that — in contrast to environmental or labor regulation — have no justification other than the protection of incumbent interests. For example, courts could force legislatures to explicitly approve expansions in the scope of occupational licensing, depriving licensing boards of the power to do so in shadowy obscurity.